summer reading list, part 1

today i'm meeting up with j to go to the warhol exhibit at the san diego museum of art. then we'll wander around hillcrest, have some yummy food and browse around some independent bookstores.

i went to borders and picked up the following books to consume during the next week or so:

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
I'm starting out with this one because after the bar, my brain recoils from anything requiring more than minimal processing ability. So far, it's entertaining, funny and sometimes even witty, and requires no mental capacity whatsoever--everything a summer beach read should be.

The Mortocycle Diaries by Che Guevara
I had no idea until yesterday that this book was actually written Che Guevara. I always thought it was some sort of historical fiction. He's an awesome writer, too. Can't wait to start on this one.

The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs
"One Man's Humble Quest to become the Smartest Person in the World."
Hilarious nonfiction. A.J. Jacobs, an NPR contributor, chronicles his quest to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z. I've always wanted to do that! But I guess I'll just settle with reading this book.
Sidenote: The back cover says something about how astounding reading the whole Encyclopedia Brittanica is, because it's 33,000 pages long. I stopped and thought that I've read more than 33,000 pages these past 3 years in law school, and how much more enlightened (and less in debt!) I'd be if I had just spent the 3 years reading the encyclopedia instead of law textbooks. Okay I'm depressed now.

Blindness by Jose Saramago
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Oh, the allegorical loveliness of it all!
Blurb from Amazon: In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape.
In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city."

Fascinating, no? I heard of this from a Law and Literature class I took a few years back.